13th of January, 2014 I had a flight from Rzeszów (Poland) to London. I left my previous Software Developer role in Software Mind to grow my carrier in other country. 2 weeks later I started my first UK based job in Iglu.com LTD, a travel agency who specialise in Ski and Cruise holidays.

In the previous post about Topshelf and Quartz.NET I mentioned that there is a chance to configure the inversion of control container instead of manually pointing which implementation we want to use. In this post, I will explain how to do just that, using a few popular inversion of control containers – Ninject and StructureMap. If you prefer any other container, please let me know. I’ll do my best to include it here.

I often work on applications whose sole task is to execute a script at certain time or day. You may approach it in several ways, eg.: Task Scheduler (Windows), SQL Job (if it is a SQL task) or CRON in Linux. You may also write application, which would run in background and execute a script at certain time. The only question is – do you really want do it?

In this post, I would like to introduce other solution to tasks like this. The combination of two frameworks: Topshelf (Windows host) and Quartz.NET (free-for-business company Task Scheduler).

How often in your code do you see ifs checking whether the object is not null? Often? Very often? What would happen if you didn’t have to check it out? Surely code would be easier to maintain – no ifs = no test cases. This can all be achieved using Null Object pattern.

Null Object pattern should be used as a substitute for objects which don’t exists in the runtime or you don’t know current state of the object. You may apply it, however, bear in mind that it’s not suitable for all test scenarios. You’ve to analyze whether it’s a good idea to use it.

Amazon Web Services CloudSearch is a search engine and it’s offered in a SaaS model (as well as Elasticsearch what I’ve already explained here). I’m currently writing an article about it so I’ll skip the way how to set it up and how it works. Unfortunately, CloudSearch isn’t free. It doesn’t cost much if you take a look at everything what you get. For more information on pricing check here.

There’s few issues with CloudSearch. One of them is the fact that there’s no easy way to clear search domain. AWS CLI has no such feature. At StackOverflow, I managed to find scripts for Java, NodeJS, PHP or bash.

2016 is coming to the end. I’ve read a lot of summaries of what people have done in 2016 or want to do in the coming year. I also decided to prepare something like that. To help myself check at the end of 2017 what have been done and what not.

Often developers as a log store use text files, system events, output console or database. In some cases they use distributed systems such Splunk or Elasticsearch. In this article I would like to present how to store logs in the form of objects, rather than plain text, which also offers all sorts of graphs and charts called dashboards. To achieve it, I’ll use Serilog, Elasticsearch and Kibana.

To test this solution, you’ll need Visual Studio (obvious), an Elasticsearch instance and the Kibana extension on your PC. You may as well use Amazon Web Services which offer these services even for free. I prefer the second option because it is much easier and quicker to set up.

Many people associated with the IT industry reflects the move from Eastern Europe to the West, United Kingdom, Germany or the United States. Not only because of better earnings, but major opportunities to develop your career and meet new people from different places around the world.

A few years ago, for a long time I though about it. Until one day, together with my wife we decided to move to London. It was 3 years ago. Time flies…

In this post I would like to present some advice about moving to UK.
How to prepare yourself.
How to find a job in IT.

Every programmer when working with databases will use a framework, which facilitates and speeds up development time. It is no different with me. I never liked ADO.NET. Taking out the data and storing it in a DataSet or DataTable that were not strongly typed is not a best idea. Especially when someone else on the later stage had to work with this code and no one actually knows what the author had in the mind writing it. For many years, I enjoyed the heavier Object-Relational Mapping frameworks, i.e. Entity Framework (version 4.0), LinqToSQL (the beginnings of my work as a programmer) or NHibernate.

Every experienced developer knows how important is to cover your code with tests (or at least business logic). However, not everyone likes to do that once code is already written, because, why should we do that? The work is done, it was tested and it functions correctly, right?

I never liked to cover the code with tests once it’s already there. That’s why in this article I’ll present Test Driven Development and describe how I use it day to day.